The Storm of October 30

Abstract

THE gale which swept over the southern part of England on the morning of Sunday the 30th was both sudden and severe. On the previous day the weather was exceptionally fine over the country generally, and in many places it was a truly “pet” day. The Meteorological Office, in their morning report referring to the barometric rise which was going on in the south and west; remarked that “some improvement in the weather is therefore likely in the south.” In the afternoon of Saturday, however, there were signs of approaching bad weather, and by six o'clock a disturbance was shown to be situated off Scilly, the barometer reading 29.4 inches. The Meteorological Office considered the situation sufficiently menacing for the issue of storm signals, and the south cone was hoisted in the south and south-west districts. During the night the storm passed in an east-north-east direction over the southern counties of England, travelling at the rate of about thirty miles an hour. The centre passed almost directly over London at about five o'clock in the morning, when the wind changed suddenly about 180°, the barometer at the time registering 28.86 inches, and in the next two hours the mercury rose 0.4 of an inch. At Greenwich Observatory the anemometer recorded 17.2 lbs on the square foot at 7.5 a.m., which is equivalent to an hourly velocity of about sixty miles. By 8 a.m. the centre of the disturbance had passed to the eastward of our islands and was situated a short distance off Yarmouth. The storm afterwards travelled in a north-easterly direction, maintaining somewhat its former rate of movement, and on Monday morning the central area was in the neighbourhood of Stockholm. The gale was rather severe on our southern coasts, but its principal violence was felt in the English Channel and on the French and Danish coasts. The Paris Bulletin shows that at many of the stations the wind reached the full force of a hurricane, and the sea was terrific. The amount of rain which fell during the storm was unusually heavy, 1.59 inches being registered at Scilly, and upwards of an inch at other stations in the south of England and also in the north of France. As is commonly the case with these quick-travelling and rapidly-developing storms, the disturbance was a “secondary” to a larger disturbance which was passing from off the Atlantic to the northward of our islands.